Has CPU speed basically stagnated nowadays?

In the good old days, not only were more transistors packed into each new generation of CPU, but the speed increased also.
It seems like clock speed increases are basically stagnant these last 10 years, and speed increases these days are done by packing more CPU's (cores) onto a single chip.
Will we see only... show more In the good old days, not only were more transistors packed into each new generation of CPU, but the speed increased also.

It seems like clock speed increases are basically stagnant these last 10 years, and speed increases these days are done by packing more CPU's (cores) onto a single chip.

Will we see only minor increases in processor speed unless some new technology comes out?

Follow

14 answers 14

Report Abuse

Are you sure you want to delete this answer?

Sorry, something has gone wrong.

Trending Now

Answers

Best Answer: First you have to understand the difficulty in making a very fast computer:
GHz is billions of Hz. A billionth of a second at the speed of light is about 11 inches. So to expect computers to break the 4 GHz barrier of frequency, light and any electrical signal moves only less than 3 inches.
So you see that the tighter the circuits can be made, smaller is faster. But to get billions of transistors together on a 5 mm square silicon chip, fantastic techniques must be used. Inscribing them with light can be done down to 23 nm or nanometers (billionths of a meter) trace widths, ultraviolet light must be used. That has the shortest wavelength and can be focused to the smallest image for the most accuracy. Only X-rays are shorter, and that use is only experimental so far.
Changing the width of traces to something smaller to make chips more complex without getting huge and slow is very expensive. Nowadays a CPU costs many times what it used to. Any more expensive, and the market will dry up. Not a good business model to invest in making them.

CPU core processing speed has been slowly progressing still, with better architecture along with increases in frequency.

But yes, now CPU manufacturers are going to multi-core processing to try to make more progress, even though software isn't keeping up with multi-core processing, and it isn't worth it for many programs.

Yes, up until recently the development of the CPU stagnated badly due to one of the two main developers surrendering. Recently though AMD got back into the game, and we are now seeing a two horse race again. That two horse race should revive CPU development into the foreseeable future.

There is a much larger demand to produce small gadgets that have the power of a pc. So we are seeing faster, smaller devices that consume less power but give us higher speeds. When it comes to the pc, there are other bottlenecks besides the cpu that need addressing.

The era of the PC is over. Smartphones and Tablets have taken over and with their reduced size there is still years of upgrades until they reach the speeds of the desktops of today. By then it will be wearables or implants or some other useless junk.